Catalogue Entry
When Johnson returned from Europe late in 1855 and moved in with his family in Washington, D.C., he began receiving portrait commissions. Like the commissioned drawings done earlier, Johnson generally used charcoal (named in some records as black chalk) with touches of white and created a strong chiaroscuro for his sitters. In his later professional years as a painter of oil few portraits of children are recorded. His art commanded high prices; perhaps families were then reluctant to include their children in sittings for portrait drawings. —PH
To see an image of this drawing, visit the National Portrait Gallery Catalog of American Portraits.
Joan Macy Kaskell, "Eastman Johnson, Lithographer," Imprint, Spring 1997, p. 14: "The eldest daughter [of George Winthrop Folsom], this writer's grandmother, was named Helen Stuyvesant after her aunt, the younger sister in the double portrait [of Margaret Winthrop Folsom and Helen Stuyvesant Folsom]. In 1880 Eastman Johnson made a charcoal drawing of the young Helen, then aged twelve, just a little older than her father had been when he had sat to Johnson twenty-seven years before."
Helen Stuyvesant Folsom (1843–1882). Daughter of George Folsom (Chargé d’Affaires to the Netherlands, 1850–1853, when Johnson lived in The Hague, the Netherlands) and Margaret Cornelia Winthrop Folsom; sister of George Winthrop and Margaret Winthrop (all portrayed by Johnson). “...[T]he younger [sister of Margaret Winthrop Folsom], known as Lelly, became a member of a religious sisterhood in England and a founder of the Sisterhood of St. John the Baptist in New York. The family has leather-bound copies of her published poems about her brother's ten children” [Kaskell 1997].
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